Metrics, successes & flaming disasters in digital marketing

That Ben Affleck Movie

Yesterday’s print edition of the New York Times ran an ad for the new Ben Affleck movie about the zany 1979 CIA plot that rescued six American State Department workers hiding out at the Canadian Embassy in Tehran after escaping the hostage-taking attack on the American Embassy. If the pull-quotes in the ad are to be trusted, it looks terrific!

Unfortunately for the agency people who placed the ad in the Times, it neglects to mention the name of the movie. I can only imagine their Saturday morning brunch plans were marred by some pretty unhappy phone calls.

I’m going to see the movie anyway. According to the review in the New Yorker, “Affleck’s beard and hair style suggest someone who moonlighted from the intelligence services to pose for ‘The Joy of Sex,’ and as you study the fashions of the era, you have to ask whether the Ayatollah’s fury was provoked by US support for the Shah or, more simply, by the width of Western shirt collars.” Sounds like a provocative film.

(A closer look at the ad, with special filters to approximate the spy-glasses experience.)

UPDATE: Wait! Someone in Twitter — someone with better spy glasses than mine — pointed out that the photos at the bottom of the ad, if you close one eye and angle the paper to the light, spell out Argo. So that’s the name of the movie! Once again the editors of ChasNote have been duped by excessive cleverness.

Those brunch-time phone calls probably went more like this: “Ad looks AWESOME! By the way, did you guys ever figure out a cost-effective way to distribute the special glasses that make it more obvious that the movie’s called Argo?”